“Anyone
who understands jazz knows that you can't understand it.
It's
too complicated. That's what’s so simple about it.”
–
Yogi
Berra
The
mighty nimble fidgety digits of Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982)
Thelonious
Monk & Bob Dylan
Never
The Same Tune Twice
by
Jamie Jobb
Those
of us who grew up in Ohio River towns of the 1950s know there wasn’t
a whole lot to do for entertainment: the library, comic books, 45 rpm
records, double-feature movies, distant radio static and fuzzy
monochromatic tv. Nothing could be “time-shifted”. You had to
be there “at rise,” as playwrights say. The nearest “city”
for any kind of “show” was Huntington, West Virginia (population
86,353) two hours away.
Many
small-town families – including the Totally Tone Deaf –
entertained themselves at home with music and song. Finer homes
contained a piano, some had “piano rooms”. Sheet music of
popular tunes was for sale most everywhere. Anyone with a dime could
buy the score to her favorite song.
Claiming
Hoagy Carmichael as her inspiration, my mother always wanted live
music around our house, so she enrolled me in piano lessons right
across the street. I’ve mentioned these lessons in a previous
essay on Hoagy. I didn’t really ask for them, but mom
insisted. Boogie-woogie was the only piano style my dad could play.
And that got old very fast.
Norma
Lewis Hecox taught piano on her magnificent lustrous black Steinway
Grand, a graduation present from her parents after completion of her
studies at Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Hers was the house with
the big rounded front porch on the corner of Main and Third Avenue.
My friend Tom Rall, who lived up Third past the Carnegie Library,
also took piano lessons from Mrs. Hecox and remembers that we could
see both the Methodist Church and our house from her piano bench.
“As
to her lessons,” Rall
recalls, “I didn’t last very long. After a few times
going, she suggested we play dominoes.”
Mom
insisted I stick with the Steinway and I knew she could look across
the street to see if we were playing dominoes instead. I tried to
get enthused about these once-weekly after-school sessions so
convenient to mom. And I persisted through a season of study until
all of Mrs. Hecox’s students reached the point where we could give
our own recital – a public performance on Thursday June 11, 1953 -- the first time I would ever perform before an audience paying attention to only me.
I
had only one tune to play, “The
Irish Washerwoman”, and it was second on the bill. One of a
dozen players, my part would be over quickly, my tune was “Level
One”. But I had to read the music while I played it – a tough
task for any eight-year-old. Mrs. Hecox was a stickler for respecting
The Score and playing it Exactly Right Every Time – especially in
the holy sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church, where we were
congregants.
Mrs.
Hecox had
her Steinway moved to the
church for the occasion.
“Everybody will be there.” she
said. “And The Good Lord won’t want to hear any wrong
notes.”
*
* *
As
our
recital date approached,
“The
Irish Washerwoman” haunted my sleep. The
score danced through
my dreams, notes
rearranging
themselves into some
crazed atonal
geometric workout
…
but during
the day of performance,
I was fine. And when
my time at the Grand Piano
came, I arose to the occasion.
The
sanctuary
was brimful of family and friends. My
first moment on stage had arrived. I
sat at the polished Steinway. The sheet music opened
up there, waiting. The keys
– ebony and ivory –
glistened in anticipation … my
fingers approached them.
Unfortunately
for the Tin-Pan-Alley career mom envisioned for me, I made four lousy
mistakes – striking four Exactly Wrong Notes in the
two-minute composition! Mom tried to smile, but she knew I’d
messed up my simple Level One tune. Taken To The Cleaners by The
Irish Washerwoman!
After
the recital was over, I fled the church in shame. I recall thinking
at the time that piano lessons in someone’s home across the street
is nothing like “putting on a show” with everybody in town
actually listening intently. We lived in a village of 2,500 people.
Nothing stayed secret for long, especially when it involved Four
Mistakes In Public.
Everybody in town knew about me hitting those wrong notes!
After
that recital, I quit
Mrs. Hecox’s piano
lessons and never tried to play
music in public
ever again. Tom Rall
speaks for both of us:
“I never learned how to play the piano, much to my
mother's dismay.”
Tom’s
failure to learn was further fueled by
this irony:
“My mother, by the way, was an excellent pianist, who took theater
organ at the Chicago Conservatory of Music, sadly for her, just as
the talkies were being introduced.”
Piano-Avoidance
is a strange personal punishment to inflicted upon oneself …
however, my fear of playing music for people encouraged me to
befriend later in life many incredible musicians who had no trouble
at all with stage fright. They knew how to play over their mistakes
and keep moving right through every tune.
As
Jerry Pfeiffer, my piano genius friend from college, often said:
“Hang any wrong notes, go with the flow!”
Indeed,
I’ve learned that some musicians actively try to make wrong-note
“mistakes” – on purpose! In fact, a few of them never seem to
want to perform the same tune the same way twice.
Thelonious
Monk lost at keyboard, choosing spur-of-moment chords in Paris 1965
* * *
“If
you play the wrong part, its right.
If
you play the right part, it might be
right
– if you play it wrong enough.
But
if you play it too right, it's wrong.”
– Yogi
Berra
*
* *
Where
to Start with Thelonious Monk
“The
Wrong Notes Right”
After
Ohio we moved to Miami, where young sun-tanned teens had lots of live
opportunities to hear music. Rock and Blues bands played in clubs
and dance halls all around town. We also flocked to Folk in coffee
houses in Coral Gables and Coconut Grove. By the time I went away to
college, I’d had my fill of Folk Rock Blues tunes so I ventured
into Classical and Jazz upon the urging of my mentor and
photojournalism instructor, John Lindstrom. He was a big fan of the
off-kilter hipster in skullcap, bamboo-framed shades and goatee, The
Genius of Modern Music, Thelonious Monk.
First
time I heard Monk I didn’t get it. Everything seemed off key, half
the notes seemed to be mistakes that Mrs. Hecox would not tolerate!
Lindstrom told me that’s what happened to him when his ears were
first exposed to Thelonious. “Eventually it’ll come to you,”
he said.
It
didn’t. I kept
asking myself when I ran into a Monk tune somewhere …
What’ s his deal with all these Wrong Notes?
It’s
impossible to
find a tune of his that repeats note for note because that’s not
what he could ever do. Monk’s
mind seemed
to be
constantly searching for the “note
between the note”
… always wandering
“around”
the edges of
chord progressions, searching
for sounds
in the spaces between the keys!
Punctuating things with
his left hand when
he couldn’t seem to think of anything else to do!?!
I
still couldn’t
get Monk’s music for many decades – until well after the dawn of
the 21st Century, when I ran across an ear-opening essay
by David Inman called “Where
to Start with Thelonious Monk”. Inman’s approach allowed me
to abandon my stringent Steinway box, by thinking my way out of it.
Let Inman explain why listening to Monk can be so dang daunting:
“His
angular compositions and odd habits have left jazz critics and
listeners befuddled over the years. Luckily, Robin D.G. Kelley’s
2010 biography, Thelonious
Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original,
is helping to shift the conversation from his eccentricity to his
intellect. Kelley, compares Monk’s role in the formation of bebop
to the mercurial New Orleans jazz musician Buddy Bolden’s similar
role in developing the first strains of jazz. They were both, Kelley
writes, ‘that missing link who started it all, but then
disappeared.’
“And,
like Bolden, who was committed to an insane asylum in 1907, Monk had
mental-health issues. In Clint Eastwood’s 1988 documentary,
Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser,
Monk’s son, T.S. Monk, manager Harry Colomby, and late-period
collaborator Charlie Rouse all testify to his schizophrenic episodes
and manic depression. By the 1970s, as jazz-fusion was becoming the
order of the day, Monk gave up music and went into seclusion, further
complicating his legacy.”
So
Monk eventually went nuts, but there were more than a few music
theorists who could comprehend what Thelonious was trying to
accomplish with his unconventional strident playing style. David
Inman advocates the following essential keys for a systematic
listening approach which certainly helped me comprehend the music of
Monk:
First,
start with this “gateway” Riverside Record of 1955: “Thelonious
Monk Plays the Music of Duke Ellington”. Specifically listen to
the following classic, which should be familiar to anyone who knows
Ellington’s tunes. Note how Monk and his bandmates noodle around
the main melodic progression of this famous song: “It
Don’t Mean a Thing … If It Ain’t Got That Swing”
(4:39).
Listen
to the “hesitation” in rhythms from Monk’s hands.
Next,
move on to Monk’s renditions of other
standards
which
he recorded early in his career. Here are two familiar
tunes which Thelonious
reworks in his own style:
“Nice
Work If You Can Get It”
(4:16)
and “April
in Paris”
(8:01).
Listen
to both tunes through to the end. Monk
wanders
into new melodic pastures a
while
… before
he eventually
bounces
back to the theme at
hand.
After
Monk’s surprising hesitations and side-tracked syncopations start
to settle in, then it’s easier to move on to his more adventuresome
creations which tend to “sound out of key and in key at the same
time” – as one astute YouTuber commented on Monk’s wacky
1964 version of “Lulu’s
Back In Town” (9:53). Take a listen to that and keep reading.
*
* *
Question:
What’s
syncopation?
“That's
when the note that you should hear now
happens
either before or after you hear it.”
– Yogi
Berra
The
heavy rhythmic element of Monk’s style harkens
stride
piano players like Art Tatum and James P. Johnson who
influenced
Thelonious,
particularly in terms of his comprehension
of a
piano-man's left-hand
“rhythm section”.
This
Stride
Style
stretched
traditional
Marching
Band
music into
something that sounds more akin
to
Ragtime.
Once
a listener can tolerate
Monk syncopating
himself at
will,
then it’s
time
to graduate
to his more unique efforts.
Here, from
this
1963 live performance in
Japan he
offers an edgier, punched down
sound
– percussive
and
atonal – while
hitting all the
wrong notes right in
this rendition of his
classic
"Epistrophy”.
The
key to “getting” Monk’s flow is attuning both mind and ear to
anticipate What Happens Next! Anyone who wishes to go further,
should check out What
Makes Monk Sound Like Monk (31:57) which breaks down Monk’s
sound on his composition “Friday the Thirteenth”. Exuberant
YouTuber Aimee Nolte dissects the rhythmic, harmonic, melodic and
structural elements of Thelonious’ “unmistakable” sound.
Anyone serious about Monk may wish to invest the half hour this video
requires.
Otherwise
there’s Princeton’s musical theorist Vince di Mura who
dramatically dissects Monk’s musical math in this short but
informative at-the-keyboard video where he explains how Monk makes
“wrong notes
right” (5:53) using something called “the tritone” or “The
Devil’s Interval”. Here’s di Mura:
“On
the guitar, which is the primary blues instrument, the guitarist
allows himself to bend the strings. He can find the pitches between
one note and another note. I give the illusion
(on the piano) of
that same kind of raunchy bending by playing what we call a
‘cross-relationship’ where the major third and the minor third
coexist … but they happen to coexist an octave apart. We call it a
‘Sharp Nine’ ...”
At
his keyboard, di Mura demonstrates
how that fractional
math
structure sounds and how Monk elaborates on the right/wrong note feel
of major/minor thirds in
coexistence –
playing it out in examples which punctuate Monk’s
offbeat stylings.
Thelonious
spent the first five years of his life on Red Row in Rocky Mount N.C,
living next to an Atlantic Coast Line rail-yard junction. Certainly
his developing ears grew accustomed to the sudden clattering clanks
and whining grinds of trains recoupling in the
incessant
industrial improvised percussion session outside his window.
From
there, his family moved to San Juan Hill in New York City at the
start of The Roaring Twenties. James P. Johnson, the stride genius,
lived in the neighborhood. Young Thelonious was surrounded by the
sounds of big bands, pianomen, crooners on the radio mixing with the
street sounds of gospel. Monk found a piano and taught himself how
to play. Later he sought formal training and ended up at the
Juilliard School of Music. But he favored the compositions
of the jazz masters
of his time: Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Bob Tatum. During
The Depression in the mid 1930s, Thelonious landed a gig as house
pianoman at Minton’s Playhouse, center of the bebop
revolution of the time featuring the unique sounds of Charlie Parker
and Dizzy Gillespie.
Clearly,
moody
genius hangs out at its own tempo.
*
* *
All
the
broken
notes and
syncopated
fractions of chords flowing
from the flat fingers of
Thelonious Monk bespeak
without
words the
offbeat verbal
gymnastics
of modern song-poet Bob Dylan. And
while Monk
never seemed to perform
the same tune the same way twice, the
same
goes
for
Dylan’s
performances.
Of
course, each composer has amassed a huge body of work. Dylan
continues to perform,
still playing on his Never Ending Tour – thirty years running after
it began in 1988.
Although
Thelonious rests in peace, many of his incredible live performances
are available
in various YouTube reiterations for current piano students to study
all those
wrong-notes-right –
four decades
after his passing.
Both
Monk and Dylan could
be accused
of relentless
reiteration – restlessly
reworking around the bones of a tune. So
when they played
that tune
again (and again) it’s ...never the same song
the same way
twice.
Both
composers always altered programs to suit current conditions. But
Monk never expressed his “love songs” in words, so he gets no
scrutiny in the lyric department.
Of
course, Dylan does not write simple Hoagy boy-meets-girl
lyrics. But despite his lyrical complexity, Dylan keeps repeating
himself there too! Some might say plagiarizing himself. See the
similarities in these lines from two of his tunes, written 27 years
apart!
Tight
Connection To My Heart (1985):
You’re
the one I’ve been looking for
You’re the one that’s got
the key
But I can’t figure out whether I’m too good for
you
Or you’re too good for me
Long
and Wasted Years (2012):
Is
there a place we can go?
Is
there anybody we can see?
Maybe
what’s right for you
Isn’t
really right for me.
*
* *
Joan
Baez in 1965 envisions Bob Dylan, foresees “Diamonds and Rust”
* * *
“On the right night, Bob Dylan is
the greatest rock’n’roller that ever lived.”
– Bill Graham
Yes Bill, but:
How do we know we’ll
catch him on the right night?
* * *
Don’t
Think Twice, I’m Sick of Love
If
they know him at all – and a lot of 21st Century folks
have never heard of the guy – people recall Bob Dylan for his Folk
protester roots. To much of the world, he seems a strange and
estranged lone ranger: a guy meant to wander … “not from
around here”.
In
the syllabus
for his continuing studies program, “Like a Rolling Stone: the Life
and Music of Bob Dylan”, Stanford University instructor Ken Berman
traces “the unlikely evolution of one of the greatest
songwriters of our time” from humble middle-class origins in
Minnesota to his Never Ending Road Show, still touring as he
approaches 78 years of age. Bob’s initial tunes recall Woody
Guthrie’s focused rabble-rousing songs and that placed him at the
vanguard of the budding Folk movement focused in Greenwich Village in
the 1960s. But Dylan soon proved that he defied easy classification.
Many
of my generation have wondered what the world might have become had
star-crossed lovers Bob and Joan Baez stayed together, like Ozzie and
Harriett. What if they’d had kids --- all musical geniuses – who
also toil for NGOs and/or the United Nations? Instead their pop-star
union perished in flames and Joan wrote these lines to bury it in her
haunting ode to their time together, “Diamonds
and Rust” (1975):
“Now
you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then gimme another
word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping
things vague
'Cause I need some of that vagueness now
It's
all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly
And if
you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid.”
After
splitting from Baez, Dylan switched to electric guitar at the Newport
Folk Festival in July 1965, obviously reaching for a larger popular
audience. Although many considered Bob a “Judas” for
“abandoning”
his acoustic guitar, he
continued to play “unplugged” as
well. Dylan was
well on
his way to becoming
the Blues/Rock/Folk icon who now plays piano -- not guitar -- at the
end of his career.
A1974
motorcycle accident forced Dylan
into retreat at Woodstock, where
he recorded the
notorious “Basement
Tapes” with The Band. He
then went on to headline
first-of-their-kind
arena traveling shows
like The Rolling Thunder Revue. While
living the life of an LA rock star in the mid 1980s, the
songwriter also worked
with playwrights Sam Shepard and Jacques Levy before eventually
heading out on what evolved into his Never Ending Tour.
* * *
“Sometimes
I throw in a word ‘cause it sounds good.”
–
Bob
Dylan
*
* *
When,
if ever, can a song written by Bob
Dylan
be
considered "finished"? And what are
we to
make of long
lost tracks
of
Dylan
songs
that were greenlit for release and then later
discarded – after the auteur decided they somehow didn't quite
capture the totality of what he was trying to express … at
the time?
An
obvious riddle among singer/songwriters is aimed at Dylan: How can
you recall all those intricate and
hard-to-remember lyrics!?! The
strict answer is … Bob
doesn’t. Not
because the lyrics are too complicated, but because
the song is never really
“done”.
“While
Dylan is known to endlessly and brutally edit his lyrics until the
very last minute in the studio,” The
New Yorker’s
Jeff
Slate writes.
“It’s
a guilty pleasure of Dylanologists to trainspot the tweaks—both
large and small—that Dylan makes to the lyrics from year to year,
or sometimes from night to night. Still, when I was presented with
Dylan’s latest revision, written in his own hand … it was like
seeing an old, dear friend, whom you know intimately, but who’s no
doubt changed and grown over the years, adapting with the times.”
Pick
any tune
from
Dylan’s
incredible songbook
– “The
Lyrics; 1961-2012”
– and
read
along while it plays. After a while it becomes clear that Dylan
seldom matches any
song
in
performance word-for-word
as originally written. Indeed, Bob
rearranges
his
tunes
so much on stage, it’s difficult to tell if
it’s the same song.
Few
Dylan fans have stuck with his interminable international
Never-Never-Ever-Ending Tour – now in its thirtieth year. Fewer
still can tolerate hearing Bob’s recent hazardous flirtation with
Frank Sinatra’s standards. Dylan is no Sinatra, vocally speaking,
and Bob proves it convincingly.
*
* *
“I’m
sick of love.”
– Bob
Dylan
*
* *
His
ex-wives and lovers also will attest that Bob Dylan is a bad mate: a
hot spotlit Casanova. Never comes home, always late, distracted,
always on tour. Aside from anything else Joan Baez could write, we
also easily can glean this viewpoint from Dylan’s incredible frank
love songs … too terse for normal love verse. And yet, Dylan seems
to be somewhat overlooked as a balladeer primarily because of his
roguish reputation. Sarah
Paolantonio of
Entropy
Magazine,
puts it this way:
I
was happy to sing along to “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” …
That song tells us everything we need to know about Bob Dylan: that
he will never belong to anyone. He certainly doesn’t belong to
women. He treats us, historically, like shit. It doesn’t mean we
won’t or don’t love him. Sometimes his misogyny makes it harder
to love him, yes. That is true for many male artists. But I find
myself forgiving him over and over. The lyric I love is an early
declaration, originally recorded in 1963, of “no:” I
gave her my heart/but she wanted
my soul/don’t think twice it’s
alright.
Love
has always been a bitter pill in Bob Dylan’s mouth, and he spits it
out in song after song. Let’s look at a recent new book on that
very subject, “Seeing the Real You At Last: Life and love on the
road with Bob Dylan” by Britta Lee Shain, who elaborates on
Paolantonio’s observation from the perspective of a Dylan lover.
Shain’s
name-dropper memoir bares all her broken sadness as she got Tangled
Up In Blue with Bob during his world tour with Tom Petty and the
Heartbreakers in fall of 1987, just before The Never Ending Tour
began. Shain is certainly a brave writer to drag herself through all
this misery again … three decades later: Bob the Furtive Lover.
Bob the Casual Cad. Bob the Genuine Genius. Bob the Still Suffering
-- no not Me Too!
Britta’s
book charts the celebrity, privilege, massive LA party scene in the
1970s: Bob’s cars, motorcycles, late-night window shopping sprees
and roadside strolls in the wilds. Bless her heart, Shain’s story
is filled with an endless Hollywood cycle with lots of name dropping
and hot shopping for that right tiny thing to wear to the parties
where all the names show up. She takes a good third of the book to
rid herself of that burden.
Britta
(pronounced, as she says, Bree-TAH) fell in love with Dylan’s image
when she was 17, and couldn’t quite get it out of her head. She
learned to walk and talk and sing and play guitar and write songs
just like him. It got confusing, certainly for those around her.
Especially after she became Dylan’s manager’s girlfriend. Their
furtive affair was silent as long as it could last, before, as Bob
writes, “then one day the bottom fell out.”
Things
got confusing for her and
she shares her bewilderment with her reader.
Was she a gender-bent
doppelganger? A
budding songwriting talent in her own
write?
Or
was she just a
“groupie” as
others in Dylan’s entourage believed?
Or
is she just
an
overlooked woman out to make a life in
public on
her own?
Shain
bares it all in brutal detail. And if
she didn’t knowingly admit it
was written ten years before she ever
met
him, Britta
might think
this 1975
Dylan song
is
about her: “People
tell me it's a sin/To know and feel too much within/I still believe
she was my twin/But I lost the ring/She was born in spring/But I was
born too late/Blame it on a simple twist of fate”
*
* *
“The
world could come to an end tonight, but that's all right
She
should still be there sleeping when I get back.”
–
Bob
Dylan
*
* *
In
recent months, a new forum has opened for Dylan’s work: the
“legitimate stage”. “Girl from the North Country”, a
musical based on fourteen of Dylan’s most dramatic tunes, premiered
last year at The
Old Vic in London. After moving to the West End, that show
recently opened in New York at The
Public.
Another
venture, a film by Luca
Guadagnino based on
Dylan’s
seminal “Blood on the Tracks” album, is also
being
developed from a script by Richard LaGravenese.
The film will follow
the album’s story of Dylan’s split with his
sad-eyed-lady-of-the-lowlands, Sara his first wife.
Tom
Moon of NPR’s
First Listen points out that the tunes on this album add up to
one strong and intriguing storyline:
“One
protagonist confides he only knows of careless love; another follows
a cold trail in vain hope of reconnecting with the woman who made
things make sense. Several songs share what happens when the angry
words of a former lover reach into the psyche at the cellular level,
coiling around the valves of the heart until they change a man's
perspective, his sense of identity. One song is bitter and
astringent; others are wistful, tender, nostalgic. Heard front to
back, these pieces form an inquiry into the shifting dynamics of
relationship that has no parallel anywhere in the history of popular
song.”
Theatrical
restorations of his works are forcing a reevaluation of Dylan’s
worth as a love songwriter. Someone might want to ask: Is this the
same blowin'-in-the-wind “unwashed phenomenon” as Joan Baez once
observed?
Despite
his numerous Grammy, Golden Globe, Pulitzer, Oscar, Nobel Prize and
Hall-of-Fame awards, a recent pair of Big Time theatrical productions
can only elevate Dylan’s lyrics into another rung on the
stratosphere of public recognition. Old fans may suddenly realize
upon hearing these reworked tunes: So THAT’S what he was saying?
Sung as they are by vocally astute stage professionals who’ve
devised new ways to convey his love songs so the lines land well
beyond Dylan’s raspy carnival-barker arrangements of his own work.
See for yourself: Sheila Atim singing “Tight Connection” from
“Girl from the North
Country” from the original Old Vic show (5:55); then see
Dylan’s music video of the
same song (5:16)
Tight
Connection To My Heart
Well,
I had to move fast
And I couldn’t with you around my neck
I
said I’d send for you and I did
What did you expect?
My
hands are sweating
And we haven’t even started yet
I’ll
go along with the charade
Until I can think my way out
I
know it was all a big joke
Whatever it was about
Someday
maybe
I’ll remember to forget
I’m gonna get my
coat
I feel the breath of a storm
There’s something I’ve
got to do tonight
You go inside and stay warm
Has
anybody seen my love
Has anybody seen my love
Has anybody
seen my love
I don’t know
Has anybody seen my love?
You
want to talk to me
Go ahead and talk
Whatever you got to
say to me
Won’t come as any shock
I must be guilty of
something
You just whisper it into my ear
Madame
Butterfly
She lulled me to sleep
In a town without pity
Where
the water runs deep
She said, “Be easy, baby
There ain’t
nothin’ worth stealin’ in here”
You’re
the one I’ve been looking for
You’re the one that’s got
the key
But I can’t figure out whether
I’m
too good for you
Or you’re too good for me
Has
anybody seen my love
Has anybody seen my love
Has anybody
seen my love
I don’t know
Has anybody seen my
love?
Well, they’re not showing any lights tonight
And
there’s no moon
There’s just a hot-blooded singer
Singing
“Memphis in June”
While they’re beatin’ the devil out
of a guy
Who’s wearing a powder-blue wig
Later he’ll
be shot
For resisting arrest
I can still hear his voice
crying
In the wilderness
What looks large from a
distance
Close up ain’t never that big
Never could
learn to drink that blood
And call it wine
Never could
learn to hold you, love
And call you mine
Further
Sources:
Kelley,
Robin D.G. Thelonious
Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original.
New York: Simon and Schuster (2010).
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bob-dylans-poetics
Shain,
Britta Lee. Seeing the
real you at last: Life
and love on the road with Bob Dylan.
London: Jawbone Press
(2016).
Ward,
Geoffrey C. and Burn, Ken. Jazz:
a History of America’s Music.
New York: Knopf (2000).
Thelonious
Monk: Straight No Chaser. Clint
Eastwood documentary (1988).
First
of five parts
Yogi
Berra on jazz:
THANKS
for helping me flex these memories:
Tom
Rall, Cinda Abbott, Susan Baker, Krista Wingo, Margie Harris Blake,
Charlie
Hickox, Jerry Pfeiffer, Art Crummer, Bob Shipman, Doran Oster, Oz
Bach,
John
Lindstrom, Ben Howell Davis, T-Bone Davis, Aimee Nolte, Vince di Mura
and The Unknown Cellist from the University of Florida
orchestra, 1966.
*
* *
"It's
not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play."
– Miles
Davis
*
* *
